Johannes is the co-founder of Another month is over, it’s time for income facts again. Please excuse the delay, I’ll try to be more on time next month.
If you are new to this series, let me explain it to you: Since Android is an open platform, I decided to be open about the income I’m making with my private Android apps too. In the last report I aimed to reach $1,100 for the last month. You will see if it worked out.
For all income reports, please click here.
Which Apps?
3D Invaders – about 107,000 installs (+7k), 15% active
AL Voice Recorder – about 399,000 installs (+17k), 24% active
AL Voice Recorder Ad Free – 747 installs (+27), 41% active
Droid-Blog.net Android App – 235 installs (+44), 26% active
SmsToSpeech full – 686 installs (+11), 42% active
What did I do?
At about the 20th of September it was clear that I wouldn’t hit my goals. Fortunately I was just in between two projects and was able to invest a day. In that time I reworked the AL Voice Recorder technically and added two new features: A seekbar (finally!) and speech to text for the naming of records. Additionally I did something I should have done a long time ago: I integrated madvertise. I also published a minor update for 3D Invaders, but added no big features.
Advertising Stats
Enough talking, lets start with the facts!
Here are some statistics from the two advertising networks I’m using, AdMob and Madvertise. Please read the second income report for an explanation of the following numbers.
AdMob:
Requests: 348,715 (-90k)
Impressions: 324,318 (-96k)
Fill Rate: 93% (-2.79%)
Clicks: 7,390 (-1k)
CTR: 2.28% (+0.28%)
eCPM: $1.04 (+$0.13)
House Ads: 9,620 (-12.7k)
Adjusted Requests: 358,335 (-102k)
Adjusted Fill Rate: 90,51 (-0,65%)
Madvertise
As I’m not using house ads in Madvertise, no adjusted requests and fill rates are shown here.
Requests: 291,556 (+40k)
Impressions: 53,706 (+300)
Fill Rate: 18% (-3%)
Clicks: 2,292(-582)
CTR: 4,27% (-1.1%)
eCPM: $8,19 (-$2.09)
Performances of both networks were not as good as in the previous month. Since I added madvertise to the voice recorder who worse CTR than 3D Invaders, I can probably expect madvertise’s CTR to drop a little further this month.
How much?
This time I split up my ad revenue to give you a better overview of the potential performance of games vs. tools:
Madvertise:
3D Invaders: ~$398,72
AL Voice Recorder: ~$42,01
Madvertise Total: ~$440.73 (-$109.62)
AdMob:
3D Invaders: $134.13
AL Voice Recorder: $204.61
AdMob Total: $338,74 (-$41,94)
Market sales: ~$65,32 (-$24,08)
In-App purchases: ~$4.46 (-$3.77)
Total: ~$849.25 (-179.32)
I missed my goal big time. The retrogressive growth of my app downloads were clearly visible in my income this time. I hope the changes I made and will make will lead my income into the right direction for this month.
What’s next?
In the second half I hope I’ll be able to do a bit more development on my own apps so that I’ll be able to make some new releases soon. We will see.
Since I missed my goal for the last month, this time it again is $1,100.
Please feel free to share your own experiences and hints in the comments. Please also don’t hesitate to tell me if there is anything else you’d like to get some information about.
2011/10/06 at 10:16
Well, you’re still doing better than me :) I’m still trying to catch up on the income reports, looking at different ways to visualise the data at the moment. Hope your extra time spent on development this month pays off in terms of added revenue. It’s interesting to note the correlation between updates / improvements to apps, and the amount of revenue. Android apps don’t seem to be a good source of passive revenue yet.
2011/10/06 at 11:19
I’m looking forward to see the improvements you made.
Well, as you can see from my last income reports, I did almost nothing to improve my in the last five months, so I think it’s actually quite passive.
2011/10/06 at 12:00
But when doing Android development for third parties, thats rather non-passive income of course ;-) Sometimes, seeing money almost immediately is a good motivation to go on.
2011/10/06 at 23:34
I noticed some comments in the market on your game Gravity Wins, were people complaining about notification ads. Are you using any air push ads now?
2011/10/07 at 23:41
Hi Johannes,
Thanks for the new report. As a developer myself I find your blog very inspirational on this topic, rarely discussed in detail. I’ve just launched an app using the dual madvertise/admob model (+ paid version) although I had to remove admob quick, as they have a nasty crash in their latest SDK. From ealy numbers it looks like madvertise will be decent. Thanks again for all the info you posted, this definitely helps.
2011/10/08 at 14:21
Hello b0b,
great to hear that! Good luck with your app!
2011/10/08 at 14:59
Well these are actually not ads but invite into HeyZap. I integrated this social gamer platform so people can join in with gravity wins. The HeyZap AddOn sends sometimes invites over notifications.
Some people just unfortunately misinterpreting them as ads.
2011/10/08 at 19:32
I thought it may have been heyzap. I had the same problem when I. Integrated heyzap in my games. People dont seem to understand its not air push ads. What I ended up doing was turning heyzap off by default and only initializing it if they clicked the heyzap button.
2011/10/18 at 17:08
You mentioned that the fill rate for Madvertize isn’t perfect outside of Europe. Do you have a strategy for ensuring that ads are served from a network that has ads for it?
2011/10/18 at 17:22
Hello journryman,
thank you for your comment.
Yes, I have. Please take a look at http://droid-blog.net/2011/08/19/how-to-combine-madvertise-with-another-ad-network/.
Best regards
Johannes.
2011/10/21 at 10:27
Hi Johannes,
I followed your tutorial to mix madvertise with other networks and i released my first app 3 days ago. I combined Adwhirl (using MillenialMedia as main network) and standalone Madvertise(out of AdWhirl). But I think i Failed hard because this are my Mad results:
1.158 0 0% 0 0,00% 0,00€ 0,00€
at same time – daily i got no more than 50-60 request in MillenialMedia but they are on 100% fill rate.
Don’t know what happens and what to do .. (maybe throw away Mad).
I’ll be thankful to hear what do you think.
2011/10/21 at 15:49
Hi apamuc,
so you are using a custom event in AdWhirl for madvertise or something like that? I don’t know what the exact reason for your bad results is, but it looks like you set a really high percentage on those custom events, but they were all not filled. Since I don’t know how your code looks like I don’t know whether you did something wrong or madvertise did. However, madvertise aims to get integrated into AdWhirl too, as you can see from this issue. To speed things up a little, you can leave your comment on the issue so that the AdWhirl-team acts faster. After that, you shouldn’t have any issues seamlessly integrating madvertise into your AdWhirl-environment anymore.
Bes regards
Johannes
2011/10/21 at 20:04
My first try was with custom event but i dont even remember why i gave up. my second try was exactly as your example but i think the problem is that i dont have installs in supported countries bexause my test banner is working. thanks for your fast response and the link you shared. I already had found your request to adwhirl, ihope that they will integrate it soon. Probably i will leave a baner to mad and wait to see what will happend.
Sory for my post here i was opened both report and mad guide posts and misstabbed my answer :)